Books

In their raucous second book of collaborative poems, Yankee Broadcast Network, John F. Buckley and Martin Ott set their sights on America’s relationship with TV. Everything is fair game with this duo, whose work combines humor, irreverence, and speculative flights of fancy to examine a culture enamored with the documentation of its identity.

“Surely there’s never been a better book of poetry about television.” -Campbell McGrath

John F. Buckley and Martin Ott map the cultural landscape of fifty states (and several territories) over the course of fifty poems in their lauded first collection of collaborations, Poets’ Guide to America.

You’ve stumbled on the best travelogue you’ll ever find . . . In a project Coleridge and Wordsworth would have appreciated, Buckley and Ott have written a book for the ages, and for our age and place.” -Laura Kasischke

The forty-eight poems in John F. Buckley’s solo debut, Sky Sandwiches, chart a point of view seeking both the transcendent and the quotidian, as he strives to fuse a celestial realm of higher yearnings with the sandwiches of simpler sustenance. In his poems, people fly like crooked arrows, seeking targets both above and below, finding absurd hopes and stale resignations, humble dreams and sublime despairs.

“Surrealism is one of the most ruthlessly understood concepts in art . . . In Sky Sandwiches by John F. Buckley, the poet reminds us that surrealism is not an end but a means. His incredible imagery, wordplay, and humor all combine to summon a world at once real, urgent, and familiar.” -Brendan Constantine

Breach Birth marks John F. Buckley’s falling into his new role as a poet after an abortive attempt to write a self-help book, after discovering he is effectively sterile, after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, reborn as an artist in the same awkward fashion that marked his own initial entry into this world. Moving forward though sometimes facing backwards, Buckley invests this collection with the energy of dreams refracted and redirected but no longer deferred.